Woodbee
Senior Member
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2009
- Messages
- 274
- Reaction score
- 1
Well my wife and I went out and hoarded Elderberries on Friday. We brought home 45 gallons of the little purple monsters. We spent about 6 hours forking the buggers into a tub of water,floating off the unripe and putting them in freezer bags. We got 8-5 1/2 lb bags. We didn't get through a quarter of them. Our backs were killing us. So yesterday I took the remainder of the berries to a friends house and pressed the rest of them in a 150 year old cider press. I removed most of the larger woody stems before pressing. I looked at the remaining pulp after pressing and found that the unripe berries were hard enough not to have given up their juice. I ended up with 4.5 gallons of some wonderful looking juice. THEN I started looking around the WEB to find out about how to go about conversions of juice per pound of fruit. What I did find was all sorts of warnings about alkaloids and poisons in the stems and unripe fruit. So do you guys and dolls think that I have just ruined a bunch of good berries. Is there any way to test my juice to see what kind of evil might be lurking there? Will a slow boil of the juice help?
And if it is usable how much juice per gallon of must should I use?
Thanks all. Brad
And if it is usable how much juice per gallon of must should I use?
Thanks all. Brad